Post by Raquel on Dec 11, 2018 20:11:38 GMT 9

Very interesting indeed, Edward! Thanks for sharing that.

My children also make those irregular verb past tense mistakes, even my 5yo! I always correct them, but I hear a lot of "catched", "blowed", "flied", etc. "Fell" is one both my children learn very quickly; they both tell us all the time about how "I fell" and that's why "I have a booboo". "Hurt" is one they also master. Nothing like hearing it a zillion times. I read once that this is a very good sign, their making mistakes regularizing anything irregular: it means they get the grammar behind it. If your daughter is saying "I comed", it means she's internalized that when something happened in the past, you add "-ed" to the verb, and that's quite something at such a short age!

Post by Edward on Dec 31, 2018 19:23:33 GMT 9

Little update at the end of the year.

The original advice from all of you is now really showing positive results. My wife is speaking English to our daughter systematically, and our daughter is learning much faster now. She also made a clear separation in her mind: 'I speak Turkish with mommy and English with daddy'. She even translates for us now. Mommy is speaking English to her, but she still thinks she should speak Turkish to her. It is not a big issue, because I see her English abilities growing rapidly. She hardly speaks Turkish to me anymore. Only when she wants to tell a really long story, then she tells it to me in Turkish, but otherwise all the communication between my daughter and me is in English.

Her grammar is slowly getting better. She is starting to understand some irregular past tense verbs. She understands 'caught' is the past tense of 'catch'. She already knew 'fall/fell'. She also finally says 'daddy came' instead of 'daddy come'. So all in all her language development is going great.

The only problem is when the in-laws visit. When they visit I am forced to speak Turkish around her (in-laws don't know English). When my in-laws are present she stops speaking English with me. After the in-laws leave it generally takes some hours/half a day till my daughter starts to speak English to me again. I don't really like this, but I think we can all agree it is not a good idea to systematically ignore your in-laws. They are important too (and talking with them is also good for my own Turkish, to see the positive side of things).

Lately she is crazy about English nursery rhymes, and she loves youtube channels such as Dream English Kids. Sometimes conversations go like this: (me to my wife): we need to take the bus. my daughter: bus? oh...the wheels on the bus go round and round...' and she just sings the entire song. I am not certain how educational these nursery rhymes are but she enjoys them a lot and it is in English, so it can't be a bad thing, right?

Post by Mayken on Dec 31, 2018 21:04:26 GMT 9

Nursery rhymes are at the very least good for vocabulary and pronunciation, plus they represent a part of the culture of the ml country/countries (even though the latter might be less relevant in your case).

When my American friend sent recordings she'd made for my daughter to learn English with, they were all nursery rhymes.

Post by Edward on Dec 31, 2018 22:34:22 GMT 9

Nursery rhymes are at the very least good for vocabulary and pronunciation, plus they represent a part of the culture of the ml country/countries (even though the latter might be less relevant in your case).

When my American friend sent recordings she'd made for my daughter to learn English with, they were all nursery rhymes.

Pronunciation...sure it helps with that. The part that makes me doubt about nursery rhymes is that none of the language in nursery rhymes is 'realistic'. She can sing the entire Wheels on the Bus, for example, but if you show her the wiper of a bus in real life then she can't make the connection. In the song they use the word 'shut', but she is only using the word 'close' for closing doors. She never said once 'shut the door'. She can also sing Baa Baa Black Sheep entirely, but there are many words in it that she really can't understand yet. (wool, master, dame, lane etc.). While she's learning the pronunciation of these words, she is not learning any applicable language from these songs.

This is on my mind because we have a rule that she gets around 30 minutes of television time a day. Of course, we show her a program in English. Her two favourite shows by far are the Dream English Kids videos from youtube, and Masha and the Bear. In Masha and the Bear they speak English naturally. My child can see how another person besides mommy and daddy (the fictional character Masha) is using English. However, lately she prefers Dream English Kids. Dream English Kids basically consists of nursery rhymes and songs that are made for teaching English at preschool/kindergarten level. She adores these songs, but they are just songs..how much can she really learn from these songs? She is learning new words from these songs (much more than from nursery rhymes, actually). That's of course good, but what about using the language herself? Or listening to the language passively? Maybe I am just expecting too much from the television. I don't know. I am just not certain what is better for her English language development.

Post by Amy on Dec 31, 2018 23:16:12 GMT 9

Hi Edward!

Nursery rhymes are a very important learning tool in early childhood, otherwise nursery schools would not use them as much. They are the way kids learn best and it was a pediatrician who actually recommended them to me as an effective tool to help my eldest with her pronunciation.Rhymes are valuable for learning words (animal names, animal sounds, weekdays...), melody, develop memory and create ml exposure.

If you would rather your daughter used the telly to witness more dialogues, then I strongly recommend you play nursery rhymes in the background using Spotify/Deezer instead. You could also play them on car rides.

As for synonyms, it is the use you make of them that will help her learn them. For instance, I always call my daughter's shower fluff as such, but I recently discovered it could also be called a lily. So I started using both terms indiscriminately. My 6 y.o. immediately picked up on it and asked me why I called it a lily. I explained to her it had 2 names. Since then she knows there are two words for that object. Kids are a bit slow at understanding certain things. But one day the penny drops. For example, my 2 y.o. knows the alphabet song. She obviously hasn't got a clue what she is singing, but one day it will hit her. And even more so with a little parental help.

Amy

***"Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars" - Oscar Wilde***

Post by Edward on Jan 3, 2019 17:06:46 GMT 9

Nursery rhymes are a very important learning tool in early childhood, otherwise nursery schools would not use them as much. They are the way kids learn best and it was a pediatrician who actually recommended them to me as an effective tool to help my eldest with her pronunciation.Rhymes are valuable for learning words (animal names, animal sounds, weekdays...), melody, develop memory and create ml exposure.

If you would rather your daughter used the telly to witness more dialogues, then I strongly recommend you play nursery rhymes in the background using Spotify/Deezer instead. You could also play them on car rides.

As for synonyms, it is the use you make of them that will help her learn them. For instance, I always call my daughter's shower fluff as such, but I recently discovered it could also be called a lily. So I started using both terms indiscriminately. My 6 y.o. immediately picked up on it and asked me why I called it a lily. I explained to her it had 2 names. Since then she knows there are two words for that object. Kids are a bit slow at understanding certain things. But one day the penny drops. For example, my 2 y.o. knows the alphabet song. She obviously hasn't got a clue what she is singing, but one day it will hit her. And even more so with a little parental help.

I am comparing her language acquisition between her ML and ml. We didn't use many nursery rhymes in her ML. Mostly because there aren't many nursery rhymes in Turkish. We sang a few for her, but they never stuck with her as much as the English nursery rhymes did. She is speaking Turkish really well for her age, and I noticed she learnt most of her Turkish by just 'living' the language. Spending time with her mom and her grandparents made her learn Turkish so well.

I notice the same with English now. Now that both mommy and daddy are speaking English to/with her, she is learning new things almost every day. This is mostly from direct dialogues between English speaking individuals and my daughter.

I do think the nursery rhymes have another function. She loves them, and that is important too. Last night when I started to rock her to sleep, she said to me 'Hush, Little Baby, daddy'. Normally she doesn't want this song anymore (she is not a baby anymore!), but rarely she wants me to sing it to her. I guess she still remembers it from her baby times. She got really attached to some nursery rhymes, the same way adults get attached to music, and that's a very important thing as well. Plus, while she is singing her nursery rhymes, she easily continues speaking in English after she is done singing the nursery rhymes. It does put her mind in 'English-mode', so to speak.

Same idea with the television. She really enjoys Dream English Kids now, so even if she might not learn as much from it, she is still having so much fun with an English show. That's important too. And to be fair, she learnt a lot from it, just not that relevant at her age yet. She knows the alphabet and she knows the sounds of quite a few letters. She knows her shapes, which I originally thought wasn't that important, but now each time she lacks vocabulary she will refer to it by its shape, instead of using the Turkish word. And yeah, she knows stuff like dump truck and concrete mixer now.

Post by Tatyana L on Jan 4, 2019 1:17:06 GMT 9

Nursery rhymes and fairy tales are actually really good for language acquisition. If you consider the songs and stories carefully, a lot of them have an element of repetition. That is fantastic for language learning. A child can expect the next verse and be excited if they guessed correctly (like old McDonald with his animal sounds). That feedback loop and the ability to change one tiny thing and see how the predicted sentence changes, is one of the most powerful language learning mechanisms. Even within old language like “dame” and “master” you can make up your own slight variations with more modern words. My black sheep had wool for mama and papa on occasion.

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Amy: Cute code switching this morning when my 3 year old told me "I get my pótamo" (she meant her hippo soft toy). This mixing was music to my ears... It means she is truly growing trilingual. Apr 6, 2019 2:51:35 GMT 9*

Adam Beck: Lovely, Amy! Good for you, and good for her! P.S. I like hippos.Apr 7, 2019 10:32:37 GMT 9

Alba: So funny, Amy! Great to hear I love the word Hypo, every child says it different! My son did something similar when he say "This tocotó", he calls horses "tocotó" based on the noise they made when trotting (tocotó, iiii (neigh)-ok, for a Spanish ear) Apr 8, 2019 6:52:09 GMT 9

Amy: Cheer Alba and Adam Beck! . I love these "baby" words. They are so cute. I like the "This tocotó" another example of state of the art Spanglish <3Apr 9, 2019 4:54:05 GMT 9

Mayken: Got home from a short trip to Zürich - heard German, French & Italian on the train, and both German and French in the tram. And everyone speaks English too. It was nice to be able to choose which of my languages I wanted to speak!May 6, 2019 23:07:42 GMT 9

Mayken: It is, Amy . I didn't realise how much I had missed it.May 7, 2019 23:10:43 GMT 9

Amy: Last year, a new colleague joined my team. She's trilingual in the same languages as me. It was like magic. We change languages and even code-switch several time a day. I had missed that so much!! My monolingual colleagues must think we're freaks! lolMay 8, 2019 4:56:12 GMT 9

Amy: Unfortunately, she has resigned and is leaving shortly. I was so proud to introduce her to my eldest, one day that I had brought her to show her round my office. And to introduce other bi/multilingual colleagues. Show how important languages are.May 8, 2019 4:58:26 GMT 9

Mayken: That must have been wonderful, Amy! I'm sorry she is leaving. I would love to find someone like that. We had an English intern last year who spoke German and French. We chatted a lot.May 8, 2019 6:06:01 GMT 9

Caro C.: Oh Amy I sort of feel related to what you are saying. Some months ago I made a friend from the US. She happens to be a neighbor with four kids. We’ve been sharing back and forth and I’d love my baby girl to eventually be able to share with her childrenMay 13, 2019 12:55:09 GMT 9

Caro C.: Although maybe they will be a bit old for her, still we (I mean their mom = Sarah and me) both are very happy and grateful for each other as friends.May 13, 2019 12:57:05 GMT 9*

Mayken: As of yesterday, I am aunt to a baby girl who lives in our ml country with 2 ml parents, and I'm already planning to get them a nice nursery rhymes CD for our first visit. May 16, 2019 20:03:47 GMT 9*

Caro C.: OMG I just came across this song and it filled my heart with joy and excitement...perfect for all of us who are parents: youtu.be/g1fcnhB8GOYMay 19, 2019 14:01:55 GMT 9*

Adam Beck: Caro, thanks for sharing that lovely song. Raffi was one of our very favorite musicians when my kids were small. We listened to him all the time. I highly recommend his albums as a source of very enjoyable and very effective English input. May 20, 2019 15:32:26 GMT 9

Mayken: My daughter is on a field trip this week and I feel like I've lost my main purpose May 20, 2019 20:03:33 GMT 9*